The US military will stop its practice of shooting pigs and goats to help prepare medics for treating wounded troops in a combat zone, ending an exercise made obsolete by simulators that mimic battlefield injuries.
The prohibition on “live fire” training that includes animals is part of this year’s annual defense bill, although other uses of animals for wartime training will continue. The ban was championed by Vern Buchanan, a Republican congressman from Florida who often focuses on animal rights issues.
Buchanan’s office said the defense department will continue to allow training that involves stabbing, burning and using blunt instruments on animals, while also allowing “weapon wounding”, which is when the military tests weapons on animals. Animal rights groups say the animals are supposed to be anesthetized during such training and testing.
I was a medic in the USAF about a decade ago - training is a joint program of USAF, Army, and Navy, so we all saw the same stuff.
None of our training used animals, dead or alive. We did hear about it though: I got the impression it was something they did for the special-ops folks, which do have medical positions.
For non-special-ops medics like me, we just used mannequins. …and even back then, the mannequins for combat training were fancy enough to squirm, scream, and pump out buckets of fake blood while you’re trying to put on a tourniquet.
I don’t think live animals would have contributed anything. Like on one hand I guess there’s value in knowing that if you fuck up the simulation, something will die, so it might make trainees take it more seriously… but on the other hand, it would also detract from the training by introducing an unethical practice, and one thing we don’t want to train our medics to do is second-guess whether or not they should be patching someone up in the middle of doing just that.